Abstract:Static radio maps provide location-dependent propagation priors, but they cannot capture short-term blockage caused by moving objects. Direct sensing-assisted beam prediction is also limited because a beam index discards SINR margins, MCS thresholds, BS alternatives, and communication-equivalent neighboring beams. This paper proposes QuaMoE-DRF, a quality-aware multimodal dynamic radio map forecasting framework for proactive beam and rate adaptation in ISAC networks. Its core representation is a future beam-SINR field. We show that the full multi-BS beam-SINR field is sufficient for finite-codebook threshold-rate BS, beam, MCS, goodput, and outage decisions. For tractability, the implemented model learns a compact reference-BS local field, complemented by BS-level supervision, joint BS--beam supervision, and latent network context; we also clarify that this compact projection alone is not sufficient for BS association. QuaMoE-DRF fuses static geometry, event-like motion observations, structured sensing states, and wireless history through a quality-aware mixture-of-experts module motivated by inverse-variance fusion under heteroscedastic modality errors. It jointly predicts communication-oriented map channels and proactive BS, beam, and MCS decisions. On a dynamic multi-BS and multi-UE urban benchmark, QuaMoE-DRF achieves 402.5 Mbps effective rate, 0.0417 outage probability, and 0.1836 map RMSE, improving the effective rate by 5.67% and reducing outage by 8.35% over the strongest completed effective-rate baseline. The current validation uses labels from a compact blockage/path-loss simulator, with ray tracing used only for calibration and sanity checking.
Abstract:Data representation is a fundamental issue in deep learning. However, as wireless data scales and deeply couples across many physical domains such as time, space, and frequency, existing wireless artificial intelligence (AI) technologies lack dedicated representation solutions. Instead, they mainly rely on stitching general-purpose networks, a tool-driven paradigm that inevitably results in structural redundancy and bottlenecks in information flow. To fill this gap, this paper proposes Coupler, a wireless native-AI neural backbone designed for representation learning of channel state information (CSI)--the pivotal data in wireless systems. Leveraging the revealed physical insights of channel tensors, Coupler decomposes representation learning into individual domains on a layer-by-layer basis, and then couples the learned domain-specific features through a dimension-staggered cascade. This full-domain interleaved learning architecture enables superior parameter efficiency and fine-grained multi-domain feature fusion. Based on this backbone, we use the complex-domain multilayer perceptrons (CMLPs) as spatial and frequency domain learners, while employing three optional mechanisms--convolution, attention, or gating--to capture temporal dependencies. This results in a series of efficient channel learning schemes with diverse functionalities and extreme lightweights, showcasing the compactness, versatility and flexibility of Coupler. We evaluate these schemes on channel deduction, a general representation task encompassing channel estimation, interpolation, prediction, and feedback. Extensive experimental evaluations validate their significant performance gains and robust applicability even for real-world measured data, demonstrating the potential of Coupler as a promising basic architecture in the design of wireless foundation models.
Abstract:The integration of machine learning tools into telecom networks, has led to two prevailing paradigms, namely, language-based systems, such as Large Language Models (LLMs), and physics-based systems, such as Digital Twins (DTs). While LLM-based approaches enable flexible interaction and automation, they lack explicit representations of network dynamics. DTs, in contrast, offer a high-fidelity network simulation, but remain scenario-specific and are not designed for learning or decision-making under uncertainty. This gap becomes critical for 6G systems, where decisions must take into account the evolving network states, uncertainty, and the cascading effects of control actions across multiple layers. In this article, we introduce the {Telecom World Model}~(TWM) concept, an architecture for learned, action-conditioned, uncertainty-aware modeling of telecom system dynamics. We decompose the problem into two interacting worlds, a controllable system world consisting of operator-configurable settings and an external world that captures propagation, mobility, traffic, and failures. We propose a three-layer architecture, comprising a field world model for spatial environment prediction, a control/dynamics world model for action-conditioned Key Performance Indicator (KPI) trajectory prediction, and a telecom foundation model layer for intent translation and orchestration. We showcase a comparative analysis between existing paradigms, which demonstrates that TWM jointly provides telecom state grounding, fast action-conditioned roll-outs, calibrated uncertainty, multi-timescale dynamics, model-based planning, and LLM-integrated guardrails. Furthermore, we present a proof-of-concept on network slicing to validate the proposed architecture, showing that the full three-layer pipeline outperforms single-world baselines and accurately predicts KPI trajectories.
Abstract:Large language models (LLMs) and multimodal models have become powerful general-purpose reasoning systems. However, radio-frequency (RF) signals, which underpin wireless systems, are still not natively supported by these models. Existing LLM-based approaches for telecom focus mainly on text and structured data, while conventional RF deep-learning models are built separately for specific signal-processing tasks, highlighting a clear gap between RF perception and high-level reasoning. To bridge this gap, we introduce RF-GPT, a radio-frequency language model (RFLM) that utilizes the visual encoders of multimodal LLMs to process and understand RF spectrograms. In this framework, complex in-phase/quadrature (IQ) waveforms are mapped to time-frequency spectrograms and then passed to pretrained visual encoders. The resulting representations are injected as RF tokens into a decoder-only LLM, which generates RF-grounded answers, explanations, and structured outputs. To train RF-GPT, we perform supervised instruction fine-tuning of a pretrained multimodal LLM using a fully synthetic RF corpus. Standards-compliant waveform generators produce wideband scenes for six wireless technologies, from which we derive time-frequency spectrograms, exact configuration metadata, and dense captions. A text-only LLM then converts these captions into RF-grounded instruction-answer pairs, yielding roughly 12,000 RF scenes and 0.625 million instruction examples without any manual labeling. Across benchmarks for wideband modulation classification, overlap analysis, wireless-technology recognition, WLAN user counting, and 5G NR information extraction, RF-GPT achieves strong multi-task performance, whereas general-purpose VLMs with no RF grounding largely fail.
Abstract:The integration of sensing and communication (ISAC) is an essential function of future wireless systems. Due to its large available bandwidth, millimeter-wave (mmWave) ISAC systems are able to achieve high sensing accuracy. In this paper, we consider the multiple base-station (BS) collaborative sensing problem in a multi-input multi-output (MIMO) orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) mmWave communication system. Our aim is to sense a remote target shape with the collected signals which consist of both the reflection and scattering signals. We first characterize the mmWave's scattering and reflection effects based on the Lambertian scattering model. Then we apply the periodogram technique to obtain rough scattering point detection, and further incorporate the subspace method to achieve more precise scattering and reflection point detection. Based on these, a reconstruction algorithm based on Hough Transform and principal component analysis (PCA) is designed for a single convex polygon target scenario. To improve the accuracy and completeness of the reconstruction results, we propose a method to further fuse the scattering and reflection points. Extensive simulation results validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms.
Abstract:The rise of vision language models (VLMs) paves a new path for radio frequency (RF) perception. Rather than designing task-specific neural receivers, we ask if VLMs can learn to recognize modulations when RF waveforms are expressed as images. In this work, we find that they can. In specific, in this paper, we introduce a practical pipeline for converting complex IQ streams into visually interpretable inputs, hence, enabling general-purpose VLMs to classify modulation schemes without changing their underlying design. Building on this, we construct an RF visual question answering (VQA) benchmark framework that covers 57 classes across major families of analog/digital modulations with three complementary image modes, namely, (i) short \emph{time-series} IQ segments represented as real/imaginary traces, (ii) magnitude-only \emph{spectrograms}, and (iii) \emph{joint} representations that pair spectrograms with a synchronized time-series waveforms. We design uniform zero-shot and few-shot prompts for both class-level and family-level evaluations. Our finetuned VLMs with these images achieve competitive accuracy of $90\%$ compared to $10\%$ of the base models. Furthermore, the fine-tuned VLMs show robust performance under noise and demonstrate high generalization performance to unseen modulation types, without relying on RF-domain priors or specialized architectures. The obtained results show that combining RF-to-image conversion with promptable VLMs provides a scalable and practical foundation for RF-aware AI systems in future 6G networks.
Abstract:Simultaneously transmitting and reflecting reconfigurable intelligent surface (STAR-RIS) has emerged as a promising technology to realize full-space coverage and boost spectral efficiency in next-generation wireless networks. Yet, the joint design of the base station precoding matrix as well as the STAR-RIS transmission and reflection coefficient matrices leads to a high-dimensional, strongly nonconvex, and NP-hard optimization problem. Conventional alternating optimization (AO) schemes typically involve repeated large-scale matrix inversion operations, resulting in high computational complexity and poor scalability, while existing deep learning approaches often rely on expensive pre-training and large network models. In this paper, we develop a gradient-based meta learning (GML) framework that directly feeds optimization gradients into lightweight neural networks, thereby removing the need for pre-training and enabling fast adaptation. Specifically, we design dedicated GML-based schemes for both independent-phase and coupled-phase STAR-RIS models, effectively handling their respective amplitude and phase constraints while achieving weighted sum-rate performance very close to that of AO-based benchmarks. Extensive simulations demonstrate that, for both phase models, the proposed methods substantially reduce computational overhead, with complexity growing nearly linearly when the number of BS antennas and STAR-RIS elements grows, and yielding up to 10 times runtime speedup over AO, which confirms the scalability and practicality of the proposed GML method for large-scale STAR-RIS-assisted communications.
Abstract:Multimodal fingerprinting is a crucial technique to sub-meter 6G integrated sensing and communications (ISAC) localization, but two hurdles block deployment: (i) the contribution each modality makes to the target position varies with the operating conditions such as carrier frequency, and (ii) spatial and fingerprint ambiguities markedly undermine localization accuracy, especially in non-line-of-sight (NLOS) scenarios. To solve these problems, we introduce SCADF-MoE, a spatial-context aware dynamic fusion network built on a soft mixture-of-experts backbone. SCADF-MoE first clusters neighboring points into short trajectories to inject explicit spatial context. Then, it adaptively fuses channel state information, angle of arrival profile, distance, and gain through its learnable MoE router, so that the most reliable cues dominate at each carrier band. The fused representation is fed to a modality-task MoE that simultaneously regresses the coordinates of every vertex in the trajectory and its centroid, thereby exploiting inter-point correlations. Finally, an auxiliary maximum-mean-discrepancy loss enforces expert diversity and mitigates gradient interference, stabilizing multi-task training. On three real urban layouts and three carrier bands (2.6, 6, 28 GHz), the model delivers consistent sub-meter MSE and halves unseen-NLOS error versus the best prior work. To our knowledge, this is the first work that leverages large-scale multimodal MoE for frequency-robust ISAC localization.
Abstract:Analog machine-learning hardware platforms promise greater speed and energy efficiency than their digital counterparts. Specifically, over-the-air analog computation allows offloading computation to the wireless propagation through carefully constructed transmitted signals. In addition, reconfigurable intelligent surface (RIS) is emerging as a promising solution for next-generation wireless networks, offering the ability to tailor the communication environment. Leveraging the advantages of RIS, we design and implement the ordinary differential equation (ODE) neural network using over-the-air computation (AirComp) and demonstrate its effectiveness for dual tasks. We engineer the ambient wireless propagation environment through distributed RISs to create an architecture termed the over-the-air ordinary differential equation (Air-ODE) network. Unlike the conventional digital ODE-inspired neural network, the Air-ODE block utilizes the physics of wave reflection and the reconfigurable phase shifts of RISs to implement an ODE block in the analog domain, enhancing spectrum efficiency. Moreover, the advantages of Air-ODE are demonstrated in a deep learning-based semantic communication (DeepSC) system by extracting effective semantic information to reduce the data transmission load, while achieving the dual functions of image reconstruction and semantic tagging simultaneously at the receiver. Simulation results show that the analog Air-ODE network can achieve similar performance to the digital ODE-inspired network. Specifically, for the image reconstruction and semantic tagging task, compared with the analog network without the Air-ODE block, the Air-ODE block can achieve around 2 times gain in both reconstruction quality and tagging accuracy.
Abstract:Deep learning (DL) has emerged as a transformative technology with immense potential to reshape the sixth-generation (6G) wireless communication network. By utilizing advanced algorithms for feature extraction and pattern recognition, DL provides unprecedented capabilities in optimizing the network efficiency and performance, particularly in physical layer communications. Although DL technologies present the great potential, they also face significant challenges related to the robustness, which are expected to intensify in the complex and demanding 6G environment. Specifically, current DL models typically exhibit substantial performance degradation in dynamic environments with time-varying channels, interference of noise and different scenarios, which affect their effectiveness in diverse real-world applications. This paper provides a comprehensive overview of strategies and approaches for robust DL-based methods in physical layer communications. First we introduce the key challenges that current DL models face. Then we delve into a detailed examination of DL approaches specifically tailored to enhance robustness in 6G, which are classified into data-driven and model-driven strategies. Finally, we verify the effectiveness of these methods by case studies and outline future research directions.